How To Make Smash Turkey Burgers That Taste As Good As Beef Patties
Smash burgers are a wildly popular type of burger thanks to the signature crispy crust on each patty. This crust develops nicely due to the high fat content in ground beef blends preferred by chefs. But you can get a similar effect out of a leaner meat, with a little help from added fats. To get a crispy crust on your smash turkey burgers, add a good amount of butter to each burger patty. Turkey is a leaner meat than beef, and it needs the added fat for a proper smash burger experience.
For best results, add grated or cubed cold butter to your turkey meat mixture, and combine without over-mixing. For each pound of turkey, use 4 tablespoons of grated butter. You want to get the meat on the grill right away, while the butter is still cold. The cold butter should melt through the patties as they cook. This infuses the meat with a buttery richness, as the tiny cubes or shavings melt and essentially pan-fry each patty in butter.
Turkey smash burgers benefit from onions, too
The added moisture and flavor makes butter the secret to a great regular turkey burger, and the same is true of a smash turkey burger. In addition to a richer browned crust, added butter helps keep a smash turkey burger from drying out under the high heat of a griddle.
While the crispy crust of a smash turkey burger has a buttery deliciousness on its own, you can boost the flavor even further with thinly sliced onions. With ultra-thin onion slices pressed into the patty right on the griddle, The Oklahoma onion burger is a hundred year-old predecessor of smash burgers. Thanks to the rapid caramelization of such thin slices, an Oklahoma-style smash turkey burger is bursting with buttery onion flavor.
However you cook your smash turkey burger, try to make sure that you only flip each patty once. A minimal number of flips is one of the hacks that will transform the way you cook burgers in general, but it's doubly true of smash turkey burgers. Excess flipping will dry out burgers and sacrifice too much of the added butter to generate a satisfactory crust.